It is standard practice nowadays in a modern office for a document, which may be constituted as a stack of typewritten sheets of different sizes, to be read by an automatic device which tranlates the the document into a form, such as magnetic disks, more convenient for editing or processing than the printed page. The standard difficulty with such a system is at input, that is in individually scanning the individual sheets.
Accordingly sheet feeders are known, as for example seen in German Pat. No. 2,119,430, in German published patent application No. 2,209,483, and in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,148,877 and 3,175,824. Such devices all employ one or more rollers that advance the topmost sheet of the stack of sheets in a transport direction. Once this topmost sheet has been moved some distance and separated from any other sheets a skew roller urges the sheet laterally relative to the transport direction against a guide rail or ledge so that the sheet is properly aligned when it comes under the scanner.
The main problem with these known arrangements is that the travel path for the sheets is quite long. As a result the systems incorporating them are extremely bulky and must be designed to stand alone. This style of construction also of course increases the cost of the sheet feeder, and makes it inappropriate for a small office, which must then resort to manual feeding in order to avoid wasting valuable space on a standard long sheet feeder.